Tech Preview 2014

A family of unlocked processors, a slew of faster interfaces, new GPUs, and an Atom that doesn’t suck!

Part of being a Pure PC Power freak—a badge we wear proudly—is living in a constant state of anticipation and excitement over the next advance in performance. Because advances always happen. As surely as we can predict that Grumpy Cat will one day end up an even grumpier has-been with matted fur and a bad cat-nip habit, we can count on PC components to get ever smarter, ever faster, ever more refined, even if those advances aren't being live-blogged. That's just the way of technology, and yay for that!

This month, we seek to uncover how this inevitable progress will play out for the PC over the coming year—what it will mean for our frame rates, bandwidth, and everyday workloads. With that in mind, we pressed our most trusted industry contacts for intel. We asked the tough questions; we even greased some palms. We also got hands-on with some upcoming hardware. In other words, we gathered a sufficient cache of intelligence to make some pretty good guesses and even a few outright assertions about the technology that will be rocking the worlds of PC enthusiasts in 2014.

Ivy Bridge, Meh?

Intel’s enthusiast Ivy Bridge-E is here, but it may not matter with Haswell on the scene

The release of Intel’s Ivy Bridge-E series of chips is about as anticlimactic as you can get: It’s a chip based on a microarchitecture that isn’t just going out of style—it already is out of style. It’s a bit like trying to woot over the 2011 coupe when it’s sitting next to the 2013 model on the showroom floor.

But don’t let all the negative waves get you down; IVB-E still has its advantages. As good as Haswell is, it can’t be found in the big-boy socket LGA2011 trim—Haswell only slides into LGA1150 sockets. To make Ivy Bridge-E even sweeter, Intel has also taken the unprecedented move of offering all the new Ivy Bridge-E chips unlocked. Previously, only the Extreme Edition parts were “fully” unlocked and the LGA2011 K parts partially unlocked. This time around, even the four-core Core i7-4820K will be fully unlocked.

The X79 chipset is the one main weakness of Ivy Bridge-E and LGA2011, as it only offers two SATA 6Gb/s ports.

Of course, if you read our review of Ivy Bridge when it came out (umm… 16 months ago), you already know the story: 3D transistors, a newer 22nm process, and a healthy stride forward in graphics. But since Ivy Bridge-E doesn’t have the graphics core, the only real bump is from the x86 side. Even there, Intel described the update as a marginal “tick” upgrade in performance.

Still, Ivy Bridge instantly replaced the Sandy Bridge parts as our go-to processor, even if it wasn’t the 25 percent improved-performance high enthusiasts have been chasing since the Core 2 and Nehalem Core i7 days, and we expect the same to be true of Ivy Bridge-E: If you're building a new machine, there’s simply no reason to buy Sandy Bridge-E unless you’re getting a hell of a price on it.

The platform itself still has an edge over the Haswell Core i7-4770K platform. With its quad-channel memory controller, you can pack up to 64GB on LGA2011 boards—Haswell is limited to 32GB. Those who need a buttload of PCIe expansion should also look to Ivy Bridge-E with its 40 lanes of PCIe goodness—Haswell offers but 16. And yes, Ivy Bridge-E finally brings “official” PCIe 3.0 support. Intel would never certify PCIe 3.0 on Sandy Bridge-E, though it could be enabled with a hack; with Ivy Bridge-E, it’s official.

Unlike Sandy Bridge-E CPUs, which use eight-core chips with two cores turned off, Ivy Bridge-E CPUs feature just six cores.

The other good news is that it looks like Ivy Bridge-E is a drop-in part. Just update the board’s UEFI to one that supports Ivy Bridge-E and drop in the chip. That is, as long as you're not rocking an Intel X79 board. With Intel exiting the motherboard business, there’s literally no one left to update its X79 boards to support Ivy Bridge-E on the LGA2011 DX79SR. Folks with Asus, Gigabyte, et al, however, should be fine.

Inside the CPU, Intel basically took the Ivy Bridge microarchitecture and designed it around six cores instead of four. Like Ivy Bridge, there's a bit of a reduction in overclocking headroom. Many Sandy Bridge and Sandy Bridge-E parts could reach up near 5GHz with enough cooling. Ivy Bridge-E doesn’t clock-up quite as high but also doesn’t seem to hit the same issues that overclockers had trying to push Ivy Bridge CPUs to the 5GHz mark. The reason could be the larger die size. With its additional two cores, Ivy Bridge-E CPUs have more meat to put in contact with the heat spreader. Some have speculated that Intel’s cheapening of thermal compound hurt the original Ivy Bridge parts' overclocking capability, but we think the jury is still out on that since we’ve seen evidence that it didn’t really matter what the thermal compound was.

Ivy Bridge-E also offers significant power savings over Sandy Bridge-E components. We’ve generally been pretty indifferent to power savings on platforms designed to run 64GB of RAM, four hard drives, two SSDs, two GPUs, and enough fans to qualify as a S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier, but Ivy Bridge-E power savings is a noticeable 25 percent by all reports. That’s nothing to sneeze at when your box is sucking down 150 watts at idle.

Perhaps the sleeper feature in IVB-E is the per-core overclocking. This lets you fine-tune overclocks from within the OS in real time. With Sandy Bridge-E, OS-based overclocks required a reboot to take effect. With Ivy Bridge-E, a chosen overclock is immediately executed. It’s possible that eventually you’ll be able to overclock cores based on the applications that are launched. If a game uses only two threads, you could potentially overclock two cores to far higher clock speeds because you know the other cores won’t be hot.

CPUs Compared

Core i7-4960X

Core i7-3960X

Core i7-4770K

Core i7-4770K

Core i7-4770K

Core i7-2700K

Clock

3.6–3.9GHz

3.6–3.9GHz

3.46–3.7GHz

3.5–3.9GHz

3.5–3.9GHz

3.5–3.9GHz

Microarchitecture Code-Name

Ivy Bridge-E

Sandy Bridge-E

Gulftown

Haswell

Ivy Bridge

Sandy Bridge

Cores/Threads

6/12

6/12

6/12

4/8

4/8

4/8

Transistor Count

1.86 billion

2 billion

1.17 billion

1.6 billion

1.4 billion

995 million

Die Size

257mm

435mm

435mm

177mm

160mm

216mm

L2 Cache

1.5MB

1.5MB

1.5MB

1MB

1MB

1MB

L3 Cache

15MB

15MB

12MB

8MB

8MB

8MB

Process

22nm

32nm

32nm

22nm

22nm

32nm

TDP

130 watts

130 watts

130 watts

84 watts

77 watts

95 watts

Socket

LGA2011

LGA2011

LGA1366

LGA1150

LGA1155

LGA1155

Memory Controller

Quad-channel

Quad-channel

Quad-channel

Quad-channel

Quad-channel

Quad-channel

Price at Launch

$990

$990

$995

$339

$317

$332

It’s possible that eventually you’ll be able to overclock cores based on the applications that are launched. If a game uses only two threads, you could potentially overclock two cores to far higher clock speeds because you know the other cores won’t be hot.

No matter what, Ivy Bridge-E isn’t a game-changing chip. For that to have happened, Intel would have had to offer an eight-core version of the CPU with a high TDP. It would have required liquid cooling to run overclocked but it would have given the power users, the enthusiasts, the red meat they’ve been craving.

Still, Ivy Bridge-E is not a step backward; it’s a step forward. To find out how much of a step forward, read on.

Meet the Ivy Bridge-E Clan

Core i7-4960X

Core i7-4930K

Core i7-4820K

Clock

3.6–4GHz

3.4–3.9GHz

3.7-3.9GHz

Cores/Threads

6/12

6/12

4/8

Cache

15MB

12MB

10MB

TDP

130 watts

130 watts

130 watts

Shogun 2 (fps)

$990

$555

$310

Ivy Bridge-e Benchmarked

For our tests, we used the same GPU, same driver, and same SSD across all the different platforms, running Windows 8.1. We limited our CPU choices to the natural competition for the new Core i7-4960X: the six-core Core i7-3930K and the four-core Core i7-3820—both on LGA2011. We also decided to throw in the new Haswell Core i7-4770K and the original four-core Ivy-Bridge Core i7-3770. For additional perspective, we also tossed in a dual-core Ivy Bridge Core i3-3220 CPU.

If we had to absolutely declare a winner, we’d call it for the new Core i7-4960X, with the Haswell Core i7-4770K coming in a very close second. But the full performance story is far more complicated. Looking at just the single-core performance in Cinebench 10, the Core i7-4960X is pretty much on par with the Core i7-3770K. When you get to heavily multithreaded tasks, the six-core Core i7-4960X rules them all. The problem is that while the six-core chip more than pulls its weight in video encoding, 3D modeling, and other workstation-level apps, the Core i7-4770K is the better choice for most everything else. And let's face it, the vast majority of people aren’t transcoding video all day long, so for them it makes sense to go with the modern chipset and generally better performance in most apps and games.

That doesn’t mean we’re not recommending the Core i7-4960X. In fact, there are a few areas where the chip can’t be touched by anything else. The per-core overclocking tied to applications might also mature to the point where it easily spanks the four-core chips in less-threaded tasks, too. We’ll go with the same recommendation we’ve been making for a while: If you make a living pushing pixels, or need access to more RAM and a lot of PCIe lanes for add-in cards, go with Core i7-4960X or the Core i7-4930K. If your workloads are more conventional and you primarily game with two or fewer graphics cards, Core i7-4770K is the more prudent path based on price-to-performance ratios. Folks on tighter budgets, or those who are 90 percent gamers, who don’t need the threads for encoding or transcoding, should consider the Core i5-4670K.

One final scenario would be if you're building a box for personal use and intend to upgrade to a six-core or possibly even eight-core Xeon in the future, then the LGA2011 with a Core i7-4820K gives a good upgrade path for those who need more cores.

We don’t want to leave you with the wrong impression, though: The Core i7-4960X is without a doubt the fastest CPU in town. It does it with less power than previous chips, and for those who really want to roll a mega-gaming machine with four GPUs in it—there’s really no other choice. But we’d be far happier if the CPU came out six months ago and, frankly, if there had been an option for an eight-core CPU version.

In Other CPU NEws...

For desktop computing, the next year should be fairly steady. Intel will continue to push LGA1150 as its primary mainstream platform with its Haswell CPUs. And as you’ve read, Ivy Bridge-E handles enthusiasts' needs for the rest of 2013 and well into 2014. LGA2011, though, will likely be replaced later next year with LGA2011-3. If you’re an LGA2011 user, it’s not really clear if the two sockets are compatible. What we do know is that LGA2011-3 supports DDR4. Some leaks have indicated there may well be some backward compatibility, allowing you to drop a Haswell-E into an Ivy Bridge-E socket, but we don’t think that's very likely. It would require Intel to build DDR3 memory controllers into all of its CPUs to offer the compatibility. Intel has long shown a propensity for requiring consumers to buy a new motherboard, too. Witness the multiple, multiple chipsets for LGA775, not to mention the LGA1156 to LGA1155 move.

And frankly, as much as we like socket compatibility, we’re not so sure it would make sense here. To quote Captain Marko Ramius: “When he reached the New World, Cortes burned his ships. As a result, his men were well motivated.” LGA2011 is two years old and woefully lacking in modern amenities such as USB 3.0 and more than two SATA 6Gb/s ports.

Historians, however, would tell us that Captain Ramius was wrong and Cortes did not burn his ships, so maybe, just maybe, Intel will offer Haswell-E with support for LGA2011.

In AMD land, there have been murmurs that the company may put a stake in AM3+ by not offering its upcoming Steamroller microarchitecture in AM3+ trim. The question has been rolling around the Internet for months, with many speculating that AMD will indeed backpedal on its earlier commitment to support AM3+ through another CPU cycle. We tried to get clarification from AMD, but the company gave us no real guidance. One good sign is that our chats with vendors seem to indicate that nothing has changed on the AM3+ roadmap, so maybe, just maybe, we’ll see another AM3+ part next year.

CPUs Compared

3.6GHz Core i7-4960X

3.2GHz Core i7-3930K

3.5GHz Core i7-4770K

3.5GHz Core i7-3770K on Z77

3.6GHz Core i7-3820

3.30 Core i3-3220

PCMark 7 Score

5,964

5,606

6,348

5,902

5,607

4,816

PCMark 7 Lightweight

6,430

6,161

6,741

6,260

6,258

5,594

PCMark 7 Productivity

6,013

5,457

6,274

5,804

5,524

4,335

PCMark 7 Computation

9,075

8,797

9,454

9,179

8,834

8,053

Cinebench 10 Single-Core

7,124

6,259

8,240

7,037

6,275

5,882

Cinebench 10 Multi-Core

39,317

34,533

31,581

27,743

24,816

12,803

Cinebench 11.5

12.18

10.9

8.88

7.95

7.38

3.35

POV-Ray 3.7 RC7 (sec)

120.84

134.7

157.1

182.4

198.5

427.0

Fritz Chess Benchmark (times faster than 1GHz PIII)

31.27

29.5

32.32

30.48

29.57

13.2

Fritz Chess Benchmark (Kilonodes/sec)

15,008

14,160

15,514

14,631

14,191

6,334

Stitch.Efx 2.0 (sec)

784

872

772

868

959

1,337

PhotoMatix HDR (sec)

164

192

184

224

260

478

Premiere Pro CS6 (sec)

1,848

2,012

2,522

2,830

2,996

6,640

ProShow Producer (sec)

1,404

1,461

1,314

1,469

1,531

2,017

TechARP X264 5.01 Pass 1 (fps)

112.3

99.9

84.8

76.2

71.03

35.1

TechARP X264 5.01 Pass 2 (fps)

23.1

20.8

17.5

15.3

13.95

6.6

HandBrake 0.9.9 Blu-ray Encode (sec)

788

866

1,068

1,181

1,531

2,700

7-Zip 64MB load 12 threads (MIPS)

3,014

2,791

3,076

2,978

2,893

N/A

7-Zip 64MB load 8 threads (MIPS)

3,678

3,359

3,102

3,059

2,831

2,543

Sandra RAM bandwidth (GB/s)

41.12

41

20.3

20.1

38.2

20.6

Sandra L1 Cache (GB/s)

825.6

780

1,001

544

524

231

Sandra L2 Cache (GB/s)

517.5

483

380

321

304

137

Sandra L3 Cache (GB/s)

299.5

266

203

198

163

82

Valve Particle Test (fps)

319

286

226

209

198

111

3DMark 2011 Score

X2,231

X2,231

X2,209

X2,189

X2,217

X2,130

3DMark 2011 Graphics

1,985

1,988

1,976

1,964

1,989

1,963

3DMark 2011 Physics

13,074

11,984

9,876

9,876

8,844

4,188

3DMark 2011 Combined

2,074

2,675

2,668

2,617

2,672

2,642

3DMark Firestrike Overall

4,658

4,638

4,638

4,540

4,549

4,208

3DMark Graphics

5,014

5,015

5,045

4,980

5,021

4,977

3DMark New Physics

14,996

13,656

11,598

11,598

9,802

4,733

Resident Evil 6 low quality (fps)

12,098

12,110

13,644

13,333

12,022

11,032

Dirt 3 low quality (fps)

184.0

184.5

243.2

181

178

149.9

Hitman: Absolution low quality (fps)

85.5

79.2

77.1

77.9

74.7

53

Total War: Shogun 2 CPU test (fps)

41.4

37.7

41.3

37.6

35.2

23.6

Best scores are bolded

Nvidia Gets Busy with Maxwell

Not much is known about the successor to Kepler, but we do know it’ll be the first GPU of its kind

As we close the year 2013, Nvidia has just finished launching its second round of Kepler cards in the GTX 700 series. We believe there are still two cards coming in that series, for the low end and the high end, and then the company will move on to Kepler’s successor, code-named Maxwell. Though we don’t know much about this new architecture yet, we are fairly confident it will be the first GPU to be offered using TSMC’s new 20nm lithography process. There is speculation that delays in getting 20nm up and running might cause Nvidia to stick with the current 28nm process for Maxwell, but it seems impossible for the company to achieve the kind of generation-to-generation performance improvements it needs to have by sticking with the same 28nm process it used for its Kepler technology. Furthermore, Nvidia has always switched to a smaller process for a new generation of GPUs (Fermi was 40nm, Kepler was 28nm). The move to a smaller process will bring the traditional benefits: higher performance along with significantly reduced power consumption. If you thought Kepler was amazing at performance-per-watt, Maxwell could be twice as efficient, if not more so.

Of course, smaller process, faster, more efficient… all of that is expected, but what will really set Maxwell apart from every GPU that has come before it are two things. First, it will be the first GPU to sport a 64-bit ARM CPU that Nvidia has been developing for many years now, named Project Denver. The CPU will be integrated into the GPU die and it’s referred to in reports as a “general-purpose core.” Second, the key feature of the entire Maxwell architecture is something Nvidia calls “Unified Virtual Memory,” which will allow the GPU and CPU to share a common pool of memory. The goal of the memory pool is to allow the CPU to access the ultra-fast GDDR5 memory used by GPUs, and vice versa. Both the host CPU and GPU will still write to their own memory, but the two will now share a "virtual" layer of memory that both can access.

The shared memory will improve performance over a wide range of applications since, theoretically, data will no longer need to be copied to and from the GPU and CPU to be processed. It’s also likely that the main beneficiaries of this technology are devices that integrate a GPU and a CPU, such as tablets, smartphones, and the like. In fact, Nvidia's mobile roadmap indicates that two generations from now, its Tegra chip, code-named Parker, will employ both a Denver CPU and a Maxwell GPU, so the move to integrating a CPU with the GPU is clearly a form of convergence that Nvidia can drop into another platform. Whether or not Project Denver will benefit gamers remains to be seen, as most reports indicate it's primarily something that’s needed for server applications and other compute applications. In fact, it’s apparently so compute-specific that there is speculation that lower-end Maxwell GPUs will forego the ARM CPU altogether.

After Maxwell, Nvidia will introduce an architecture named “Volta” that moves the GPU’s DRAM directly onto the same silicon substrate as the GPU die, which will dramatically increase bandwidth and reduce latency since the DRAM will literally be right next to the GPU die. It will pave the way for a memory bus that is 1,024 bits wide, for example, with memory clocked at 8GHz. Nvidia says it expects memory bandwidth up to 1TB/s for Volta—for reference, the GTX Titan currently allows up to 288GB/s, so Volta will be significantly faster.

Going back to the GTX 700 series, when Nvidia launched the GTX 760, it made a point of noting it was done launching products for the summer, which was odd. The company usually leaves these things open in case it needs to counter-attack a surprise AMD launch, but summer has come and gone with no word from AMD or Nvidia. However, there are still two massive holes in the 700-series lineup, at both the high end and the low end. Reports indicate we'll be seeing both a GTX 750 Ti coming in at $200 or so to replace the GTX 650 Ti, and that we'll also get a dual-GPU behemoth, as well. Nvidia has always had a dual-GPU card bearing two of its fastest cores in its lineup, and so far hasn't announced anything for its 700-series cards, leaving us to speculate about the GTX 790. We don't think it'll consist of dual Titans due to cost, but dual GTX 780s is certainly possible. Whether Nvidia can make this card squeeze into the $1,000 price-tag dress these cards have always worn remains to be seen, but our guess is that AMD's new GPUs will put enough pressure on Nvidia to release the hounds.

AMD Rebrands, Launches R-series GPUs

Here comes the R9 290 GPUs

AMD wasn’t quite ready to spill all the beans on its upcoming “Volcanic Islands” GPUs as we went to press, so by the time you read this some of these details may have changed. Don’t blame us—it’s the nature of the secretive beast that is the world of GPUs. Nothing is really “final” on a GPU until it ships to customers, so manufacturers usually like to talk about a certain product in broad strokes first, then eventually send some specs, then actually launch with pricing and specs confirmed. It’s known as a “paper launch” and that’s what AMD is doing with its newest series of GPUs. That said, here’s what we know so far.

The R9 290 ‘Hawaii’ Debuts

First of all, AMD is ditching its HD 7xxx series moniker for good, and switching to something with more room to grow in the future. In its place AMD will be placing an “R” prefix along with a three-digit number that tells you where each card stacks up in its hierarchy. Though we don’t know the specific numbers of all the classes, we do know the following: The high-end cards will be called R9 290 and R9 290X, and that is confirmed by AMD. The company also confirmed that it will offer a midrange R7 and an entry-level R5 lineup, as well. The majority of these GPUs will be based on AMD’s current GCN silicon—still at 28nm since it says 20nm just isn’t quite ready yet—but rebadged and clocked higher.

There will be one new piece of silicon, however, and AMD is calling it Hawaii (the previous GPU was named Tahiti, for what it’s worth). As we stated above, it’ll be an all-new 28nm die that is bigger than Tahiti but not quite as big as Nvidia’s GK110. We know it won’t be as big because AMD has said as much in an interview on Forbes.com. AMD’s general manager of graphics said it’s about 30 percent smaller than GK110, and that the company believes it has the “best performance for the die size” for any enthusiast GPU. We expect AMD to keep its HD 7990 as the dual-GPU “ultra-enthusiast” card for this generation of cards, because the company has stated that its next batch of GPUs will not hit $999 because that’s too expensive to appeal to the average gamer.

The top-tier Hawaii GPU, the R9 290X, will likely retail for around $600, where it will take on the GTX Titan at a much lower price point. That’s still a heck of a lot of coin, but if it can get within striking distance of the Titan for $400 less, AMD will have a winner on its hands. Coming in just below the R9 290X will be the regular R9 290, which will probably arrive at $450 and face off with the GTX 780. Both R9 GPUs will most likely utilize a 384-bit memory bus, and be clocked lower than 1GHz.